#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT INSTALL#
#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVERS#
#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVER#
#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT PATCH#

#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT INSTALL#

boot VM from ISO file and install to USB stick when prompted.

create ESX5 VM in Fusion (or Workstation, principal is the same).

Install ESXi to a bootable USB drive (I used a 2GB Kingston flash drive) using Fusion.

#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVER#

Customize your installation ISO with the driver VIB using this simple tool.

Download the NIC driver VIB for the Mac Mini (mine reports as MacMini4,1) is the server version with 8Gb and 2 x 500GB SATA drives.

#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVERS#

The network drivers don’t ship out of the box with ESX 5.1 but it no longer locks up on boot so you can get in and configure the IP address, kudos to this post on the VMware communities for finding the steps, which are summarized as I alluded to this in this previous post, but due to a bug the Mac Mini locked up on boot with ESX5 and there were no network drivers, with vSphere 5.1 and a little bit of frigging it finally works – it lives! They're the world's most valuable company if they actually cared, at the organizational DNA level, it would have happened by now.You may be familiar with my vTARDIS project I’ve been trying for a long time to make this work on a Mac Mini that I have as that would be the most awesome home lab possible – it’s almost silent and is small enough to fit underneath your monitor (however large your monitor is ) They've been promising things will improve 'soon'. The last Mac Pro release was 2013 (the 2013 iPhone was a 5S!).

(For the longest time Clover would crash an ESXi VM, but this now works as of a month or two ago).Īnd finally, on the context of this whole thing-I switched from a real Mac Pro to a hackintosh years and years ago, when it became clear Apple didn't care about upgrading the hardware. Clover is far more flexible, and will work in VM setups that don't natively implement SMC like ESXi. This particular guide is using Chameleon, which is considered an outdated bootloader. I recently spent awhile trying to figure this out, going so far as to write my own SSDT tables for the device, but finally gave up. The PCI device is seen, but the EFI strings or whatever else Apple is using to determine initialization paths are wrong. However, I've never been able to get an AMD card to initialize via passthrough. Apple and NVIDIA are still not getting along, so I expect this will only get worse. If you don't need hefty performance, a GeForce GT 730 is a cheap card. Kepler generation cards are the last to work out of box, and the only to currently work out of box on Mojave. Most NVIDIA GPUs will need the NVIDIA Web Drivers to work. My other drives are ESXi virtual drives backed by storage elsewhere on my network.

Recently I moved my boot drive to a passed-through NVMe for extra speed. For USB, find an FL1100 chipset card, like the Inateck models, which works out of box on macOS, Windows, etc. I pass through a GPU and a USB controller card for input/output. I expect this will still work okay with generated data if you follow hackintosh guides. iMessage and everything work for me, but I'm also using identifiers from a real Mac Mini I retired a few years ago. You can specify board-id, ROM/MLB, etc values via your. DrDonk's unlocker on GitHub is what you need. There's an explicit 'am I running on Apple hardware?' check in there.

#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT PATCH#

For ESXi specifically, you have to patch the host to boot macOS on non-Apple hardware. Apple even ships a VMXNet3 network driver in macOS. a Mac Pro, which is on the ESXi compatibility list). Officially, only on Apple host hardware (i.e. Apple supports macOS running inside of ESXi. I came from a hackintosh, but got tired of the fragility of some upgrades. I've been running my macOS desktop in an ESXi VM for over a year now.

Macmin esxi usb boot